MTG Wandering Servant Alter - Day at the beach

A trip to the seaside is just what the doctor ordered. Sun-cream is rather unnecessary however. the beach umbrella is a nod to Resident evil. This wasn't the direction I was going for at first but colour matching sand is a pain so the less of it there is the better. I wonder if he will ever find his way home.

Custom MTG Dr Doom and Doombots Zombie Tokens

Things have been rather hectic of late so I thought it would be a good idea to ease back into blogging with a short post about a set of tokens that I have recently created.

I didn't need to, create them that is, not in the sense that their existence was required at least. On another level however it was vitally important that i got the idea out of my head and sometimes the most expedient way of doing so is just to get on and put pen to paper.

Mostly stylus to graphics tablet in this case, then printer to paper, but you get the idea. Like a song that gets stuck in your brain on loop I couldn't stop thinking about how amusing super deformed Dr Doom tokens would be.

Once you have decided to create Doom tokens however the real issue becomes what creature type should they be? The smart money is on looking at the meta and choosing the most used type but there was just something that felt off about doing them as soldiers or warriors, Dr Doom is no measly 1/1. In the end I went with my first choice and zombies it was.

You cant have Doom doing all the heavy lifting though, no he's got a country to run and superheros constantly messing with his schedule. 

He's a busy man so whats needed are some lackeys and if there's one thing zombies do well its numbers. not so much counting mind, more the physical quantity, although in this instance the fact that they are Doombots should mean they have some basic grasp of maths.

I went with your standard old school basic comic Doombot for the rank and file members of the squad because they would be a similar height to Doom himself and would fit the space better. Then brought in the bots from the Fantastic Four: Worlds Greatest Hero's cartoon to act as the heavies and fill out the background. whichever version you go for the important part of making them super deformed is to make the bodies significantly smaller than the head which usually ends up being at least a thrid of the size of the character.

Finish your squad off by splitting them across a series of cards for that added teamwork factor when you play them to the battlefield, add some fancy glows and a bit of depth of field to get more benefit out of the fact your putting them on foil, then all you have to do is set up a sheet of them and hit print.

Well then you have all the fun of craft tools and glue but the drawing part is over at least.

If there's anything that's defined this year so far, aside from the obvious lack of posts, is that things have progressed somewhat, mostly in therms of my own skills,

Its partly why I wanted to start with these tokens, there's just something about the fact that I can now do rounded corners that makes it seem like things are starting to come together, especially when you combine them with the fact I have started adding my own backs.

I wasn't happy with the way the tokens I had been making were a bit on the thick side. While creating a custom back makes the production process more complex, lining everything up and bonding the various layers together can be tricky, but combined with the rounded corners gives a sense of completeness that some of my tokens had been lacking up until this point.

So in a way maybe they did need to exist, it was just one of those moments where everything comes together to make something cool.

Walking Dead Playmat

Hands, so very many hands...

So yeah, needless to say since this mat I have had a much better grasp on drawing hands, at various angles and holding weapons, which has come in quite helpful since. 

Most noticeably on the Hellsing mat that came directly after this one, where the gloves and guns are one of the primary focuses, and I don't doubt that the mats that came after this would have looked differently without the insights learnt here.

I also seem to have spent quite a lot of time researching weapons since I began this whole endeavour, a theme that runs though my work perhaps, similar to the large number of moons that also appear, or a function of the types of people that request mats? Perhaps its to early to tell. In either case at least now I know how to draw revolvers facing forward, something of a learning experience in and of itself but also something I had always wondered about.   

Design wise here we have a mix of the comic and TV series visuals, and also the highest concentration of realistic looking faces on any of my mats (while there are others that beat it in the overall total of characters those predominately feature anime style simplified art). It turns out faces in this style and at this size are quite tricky on this material, you have to build up the colour slowly so as to avoid it running and in this instance I am also having to deal with the fact that I decide to go super heavy on the shadows for a more graphic comic book style.

Using black in this way isn't something I'm used to, comic style art wasn't something teachers were particularly keen on while I was at school and college as such I didn't want to just go into this mat blind and start blocking things in. Thankfully having a computer and graphics tablet handy allows you to test out ideas beforehand and while I was at it I also did the standard suite of changes based on looking at the image while flipped.

Having finished the mat there was something about the logo that I felt that it still needed, finally deciding that the red was to bright in comparison to the more subdued hues of the survivors clothes and the blue walkers so preceded to add some damage, as if the logo itself has been infected too.

Definitely one of the more technically chalanging designs and one of my favourites, its always nice when pieces stretch your skills and push you forward.